Sir
Victor Gollancz (/ɡəˈlæns, -ˈlænts/; 9 April 1893 – 8
February 1967) was a British publisher and humanitarian.
Gollancz was often noted as a supporter of left-wing causes. His
loyalties shifted between
LiberalismLiberalism and Communism, but he defined
himself as a Christian Socialist and Internationalist. Although he
gained high credibility by forecasting the
NaziNazi extermination of Jews,
he campaigned for friendship with both
GermanyGermany and Soviet Russia. He
used his publishing house chiefly to promote pacifist and socialist
non-fiction, and also launched the Left Book Club.
In the postwar era, he focused his attention on
GermanyGermany and became
noted for his promotion of friendship and reconciliation based on his
internationalism and his ethic of brotherly love. He founded the
organisation Save Europe Now (SEN) in 1945 to campaign for support of
the Germans, and drew attention to the suffering of German civilians,
especially children, and atrocities committed against German
civilians. He received an honorary doctorate at the University of
Frankfurt in 1949, the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz of
GermanyGermany in 1953
and the
Peace Prize of the German Book TradePeace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1960, and several
streets in Germany, including the
GollanczstraßeGollanczstraße in West Berlin, and
two schools, the
Victor Gollancz Elementary School[1] and the
Victor-Gollancz-Volkshochschule Steglitz-Zehlendorf[2], were named in
his honour. Since 2000, the
Society for Threatened PeoplesSociety for Threatened Peoples has awarded
the
Victor Gollancz Prize. Gollancz once said: "I hate everything that
is pro and anti (different peoples). I am only one thing: I am
pro-humanity."

Contents

1 Early life
2 The publisher and man
3 The campaigner

3.1 1942 prediction of 6,000,000 Jewish deaths
3.2 On the occupation of
GermanyGermany and the expulsion of Germans after
World War II
3.3 Jewish Society for Human Service, the War on Want, and the
National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment

Early life[edit]
Born in Maida Vale, London, to a family of German Jewish/Polish Jewish
background, he was the son of a wholesale jeweller and nephew of Rabbi
Professor Sir
Hermann Gollancz and Professor Sir Israel Gollancz. His
grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Marcus Gollancz, had immigrated to the
United Kingdom in the mid-19th century from Witkowo (near Gnesen, in
then-Prussia), to become cantor of the
Hambro SynagogueHambro Synagogue in London.
After being educated at
St Paul's School, LondonSt Paul's School, London and taking a degree
in classics at New College, Oxford, he became a schoolteacher.
Gollancz was commissioned into the
Northumberland FusiliersNorthumberland Fusiliers in October
1915, although he did not see active service. In March 1916 he
transferred to
Repton SchoolRepton School Junior Officers' Training Corps. Gollancz
proved to be an innovative and inspirational teacher; he introduced
the first civics class to be taught at an English public school and
many of his students went on to become teachers themselves, including
James HarfordJames Harford and James Darling.[3] In 1917 he became involved in the
Reconstruction Committee, which was planning for post-war Britain.
There he met Ernest Benn, who hired him to work in his publishing
company,
Ernest Benn Limited. Starting with magazines, Gollancz then
brought out a series of art books, after which he started signing
novelists.
The publisher and man[edit]
Gollancz formed his own publishing company in 1927, publishing works
by writers such as
Ford Madox FordFord Madox Ford and George Orwell, who wrote that
"Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket," to Rayner
Heppenstall in July 1937 (Orwell went to
Secker and Warburg from
Homage to CataloniaHomage to Catalonia on). The firm, Gollancz Ltd., published pacifist
and socialist nonfiction as well as, by the mid-1930s, a solid
selection of contemporary fiction, including authors such as Elizabeth
Bowen, Daphne du Maurier, and Franz Kafka.[4] While Gollancz published
The Red Army Moves by Geoffrey Cox on the
Winter WarWinter War in 1941, he
omitted some criticisms of the USSR.[citation needed]
Gollancz was one of the founders of the Left Book Club, the first book
club in the UK. He had a knack for marketing, sometimes taking out
full-page newspaper advertisements for the books he published, a
novelty at the time. He also used eye-catching typography and book
designs, and used yellow dust-covers on books. Starting in 1948,
Gollancz made yearly scouting trips to the USA; by 1951 American books
made up half of his publications.[5]
Gollancz's politics started as those of the Liberal Party and Guild
Socialism. By 1931 he had joined the Labour Party,[6] and by the early
1930s he had started publishing left wing political works, in addition
to his more popular titles. Although never a member, Gollancz was
closely allied to the Communist Party during the second half of the
1930s. He finally broke with the party after the signing of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pactMolotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, and pledged himself to Christian
Socialism. In the early 1940s Gollancz was sympathetic to Richard
Acland's socialist
Common Wealth PartyCommon Wealth Party and gave talks for the group
before the general election of 1945. Although he never thought the
party would win an election, he believed it represented a useful,
socialist pressure group.[7]
Religious faith was important part of Gollancz's life. His father was
an Orthodox Jew with a very literal interpretation of his faith;
Gollancz's dislike of this attitude coloured his approach to organised
Judaism for much of his life, but he continued to practise many Jewish
rituals at home.[8] Gollancz often claimed to be a Christian, although
he was never baptised and his understanding of the religion was highly
idiosyncratic. Overall his personal syncretic faith drew on Pelagian
Christianity, Judaism, and wide-ranging reading across religious
traditions.[9] His faith manifested itself in a consciousness of bliss
and his lifelong political and social campaigning. He compiled a
number of books of religious writings, including A Year of Grace, From
Darkness to Light, God of a Hundred Names and The New Year of Grace.
Gollancz was also a keen music lover, an enthusiasm he explained in
his final book, Journey Towards Music.
Gollancz was knighted in the summer of 1965.
The campaigner[edit]
In addition to his highly successful publishing business, Gollancz was
a prolific writer on a variety of subjects, and put his ideas into
action by establishing campaigning groups. The
Left Book Club was not
only a book club run along commercial lines, but also a campaigning
group that aimed to propagate left wing ideas in Britain. The founding
of the club marked the end of his career solely as a publisher, after
which he devoted much of his considerable energy to campaigning.
His first few pamphlets addressed what he saw as the communist
betrayal of left wing ideals, although after the
Soviet UnionSoviet Union was
invaded by
NaziNaziGermanyGermany in 1941 he founded the Anglo-Soviet Public
Relations Association (ASPRA) to promote cordial relations between the
UK and Russia. This was followed by refutation of the anti-German (as
opposed to anti-Nazi) doctrine of
Sir Robert VansittartSir Robert Vansittart in the
pamphlet Shall Our Children Live or Die published in late 1941.
1942 prediction of 6,000,000 Jewish deaths[edit]
Gollancz publicised the anti-Semitism of the
NaziNazi regime early on; in
1933 he had published the compilation volume The Little Brown Book of
the Hitler Terror[10] and Fritz Seidler's book on the
NaziNazi persecution
of the
JewsJews The Bloodless Pogrom in 1934. In the summer of 1942
Gollancz came to realise that he and the rest of the world had been
seriously underestimating the horrific extent of the
NaziNazi persecution
of the Jews. He explained in his 16,000 word pamphlet Let My People
Go, written over Christmas 1942, that between one and two million Jews
had already been murdered in
NaziNazi controlled Europe and "unless
something effective is done, within a very few months these six
million
JewsJews will all be dead."[11] Gollancz proposed a series of
practical responses, centred around a rescue plan, and undertook a
lecture and fundraising tour; he was also made Vice-President of
Eleanor Rathbone's National Committee for Rescue from
NaziNazi Terror.
Published early in the new year of 1943, the pamphlet sold a quarter
of a million copies within three months[12] and was quoted in the
Canadian ParliamentCanadian Parliament in 1943,[13] and in
The Adelaide AdvertiserThe Adelaide Advertiser on
Saturday 15 May 1943.[14] Along with Rathbone, Gollancz was the
foremost British campaigner during the Second World War on the issue
of the
NaziNazi extermination of European Jewry.
Towards the end of June 1943, Gollancz suffered a serious nervous
breakdown, believed to have been brought on by overwork (he had cut
out holidays and reduced his social and cultural life) and his
identification with the Nazis' victims. After his recovery he started
work on a book to be called The Necessity for Zionism; although the
book was never written, he did publish a number of books on Jewish
topics.[15] His work for
ZionismZionism at this time led to him being
appointed as a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In May
1945 he wrote his last major contribution to Jewish refugees, the
pamphlet "Nowhere to Lay Their Heads": The Jewish tragedy in Europe
and its solution, a personal appeal for the opening up of Palestine
for large scale Jewish immigration from Europe, which he distributed
for free and was a great success.[16]
On the occupation of
GermanyGermany and the expulsion of Germans after World
War II[edit]
In April 1945, Gollancz addressed the issue of German collective guilt
in a pamphlet, What Buchenwald Really Means that explained that all
Germans were not guilty. He maintained that hundreds of thousands of
gentiles had been persecuted by the Nazis and many more had been
terrorized into silence. Equally, UK citizens who had done nothing to
save the
JewsJews despite living in a democracy, were not free of guilt.
This marked a shift of Gollancz's attention towards the people of
Germany. In September 1945 he started an organisation Save Europe Now
(SEN) to campaign for the support of Germans,[17] and over the next
four years he wrote another eight pamphlets and books addressing the
issue and visited the country several times.
Gollancz's campaign for the humane treatment of German civilians
involved efforts to persuade the British government to end the ban on
sending provisions to
GermanyGermany and ask that it pursue a policy of
reconciliation, as well as organising an airlift to provide Germany
and other war torn European countries with provisions and books. He
wrote regular critical articles for, and letters to, British
newspapers, and after a visit to the British zone in October and
November 1946, he published these along with a series of photos he
took there in In Darkest
GermanyGermany in January 1947.
On the expulsion of Germans after World War II he said: "So far as the
conscience of humanity should ever again become sensitive, will this
expulsion be an undying disgrace for all those who remember it, who
caused it or who put up with it. The Germans have been driven out, but
not simply with an imperfection of excessive consideration, but with
the highest imaginable degree of brutality." His book, Our Threatened
Values, (London, 1946) Gollancz described the conditions Sudeten
German prisoners faced in a Czech concentration camp: "They live
crammed together in shacks without consideration for gender and age
... They ranged in age from 4 to 80. Everyone looked emaciated ... the
most shocking sights were the babies ... nearby stood another mother
with a shrivelled bundle of skin and bones in her arms ... Two old
women lay as if dead on two cots. Only upon closer inspection, did one
discover that they were still lightly breathing. They were, like those
babies, nearly dead from hunger ..." When Field Marshal Montgomery
wanted to allot each German citizen a guaranteed diet of only 1,000
calories a day and justified this by referring to the fact that the
prisoners of the
Bergen-Belsen concentration campBergen-Belsen concentration camp had received only
800, Gollancz wrote about starvation in Germany, pointing out that
many prisoners never even received 1,000 calories. "There is really
only one method of re-educating people," explained Gollancz, "namely
the example that one lives oneself."
Gollancz's motives for his work for
GermanyGermany can be traced to his
internationalism and his ethic of brotherly love. He explained his
rationale thus, "In the management of our helping actions should
nothing, but absolutely nothing else, be decisive than the degree of
need." For his biographer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Gollancz's campaign
was based in his concern for the moral underdog and his enjoyment in
fighting for unpopular causes.[18] The campaign led Gollancz's friend,
Rev. John Collins to start Christian Action in December 1946, an
organisation with similar aims (which later became involved in the
campaign against Apartheid).[19] In 1960 Gollancz was awarded the
Peace Prize of the German Book TradePeace Prize of the German Book Trade for his work with SEN.
Jewish Society for Human Service, the War on Want, and the National
Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment[edit]
During the fighting that marked the creation of the state of Israel,
Gollancz became concerned for the plight of the Arabs and in October
1948 he founded the Jewish Society for Human Service (JSHS), with
Rabbi
Leo BaeckLeo Baeck as its president. This body was based on "the
universalist ethic of Judaism" and aimed to work in the newly formed
state of Israel "to relieve the suffering of
JewsJews and Arabs
indifferently."[20]
In February 1951
Victor Gollancz wrote a letter to
The GuardianThe Guardian asking
people to join an international struggle against poverty. Gollancz's
letter called for a negotiated end to the
Korean WarKorean War and the creation
of an international fund "to turn swords into ploughshares", readers
were asked to send a postcard to Gollancz with the simple word 'yes'.
He received 5,000 responses. This led to the founding of the
Association for World Peace (AWP) with Gollancz as chairman and Canon
Charles Raven the vice-Chairman. In May 1951, Gollancz invited Harold
Wilson to chair an AWP committee and write a pamphlet which was
eventually called '
War on WantWar on Want - a Plan for World Development',
published on 9 June 1952. This led to the founding of the
international anti-poverty charity War on Want; its parent body, the
AWP, waned after Gollancz stepped down from the chairmanship in 1952.
With
Arthur KoestlerArthur Koestler and John Collins, Gollancz set up the National
Campaign for the Prevention of Legal Cruelty in 1955. This
organisation was renamed The National Campaign for the Abolition of
Capital Punishment (NCACP) and campaigned against judicial killing in
the UK. This drive against capital punishment would later lead
Gollancz to campaign against the execution of the
NaziNazi war criminal
Adolf Eichmann. He addressed the issue in a controversial pamphlet,
The Case of Adolf Eichmann.[21]
Personal life and death[edit]
Victor married
Ruth Gollancz née Lowy, an artist who had studied at
the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks. They had five daughters[22]
among them Vita Gollancz, an artist; Livia Ruth Gollancz, musician and
later head of
Victor Gollancz Ltd; and Diana Gollancz, a confidante of
author Philip Larkin.
Gollancz died in London.
Selected bibliography[edit]

The Making of Women, Oxford Essays in Feminism (1918)
Industrial Ideals (1920)
The Extermination of the
JewsJews in
GermanyGermany (1936)
Is Mr Chamberlain Saving Peace? (1939)
Betrayal of the Left: An Examination & Refutation of Communist
Policy from October 1939 to January 1941: with Suggestions for an
Alternative and an Epilogue on Political Morality (1941)
Russia and Ourselves (1941)
"Let My People Go": Some Practical Proposals for Dealing with Hitler's
Massacre of the
JewsJews and an Appeal to the British Public (1943)
Leaving Them to Their Fate: The Ethics of Starvation (1946)
Our Threatened Values (1946)
In Darkest
GermanyGermany (1947)
GermanyGermany Revisited, London:
Victor Gollancz LTD, 1947
A Year of Grace: Passages chosen & arranged to express a mood
about God and man (1950)
Capital Punishment: The Heart of the Matter (1955)
Devil's Repertoire: or, Nuclear Bombing and the Life of Man (1959)
Case of
Adolf EichmannAdolf Eichmann (1961)
Journey Towards Music: A Memoir (1964)

War on Want's history page
Paul Foot, Victor Gollancz: From Marx to Muddle Socialist Worker
Review, 102, (1987)
Catalogue of Gollancz's papers, held at the Modern Records Centre,
University of Warwick
Works by
Victor Gollancz at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about
Victor Gollancz at Internet Archive